"Lucretius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into human conception; others would have required the most labored elegance of composition to support them. It is certain that this author, when in a happy mood, and employed on a noble subject, is the most wonderfully sublime of any poet in any language, Homer, and Lucretius, and Tasso not excepted. More concise than Homer, more simple than Tasso, more nervous than Lucretius, had he lived in a later age, and learned to polish some rudeness in his verses; had he enjoyed better fortune, and possessed leisure to watch the returns of genius in himself; he had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... the beginning of mankind to the Deluge, a quite indefinite period; (2) from the Deluge to the First Olympiad, called the Mythical Period; (3) from the First Olympiad to his own time, called the Historic Period. Lucretius divided man's history into three cultural periods: (1) the Age of Stone; (2) the Age of Bronze; (3) the Age of Iron. He thus anticipated the conclusions of some of the greatest of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... touch this moving universe of law With ultimate light, the glimmer of that great dawn Which over our ruined altars yet shall break In purer splendour, and restore mankind From darker dreams than even Lucretius knew To vision of that one Power which guides the world. How should men find it? Only through those doors Which, opening inward, in each separate soul Give each man access to that Soul of all Living within each life, not to be found Or known, till, looking inward, each alone ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... interrogated as to the cause of these phenomena, were provided with a ready and a plausible answer. It did not enter their minds even to doubt that these low forms of life were generated in the matters in which they made their appearance. Lucretius, who had drunk deeper of the scientific spirit than any poet of ancient or modern times except Goethe, intends to speak as a philosopher, rather than as a poet, when he writes that "with good reason the earth has gotten ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Although Lucretius may not have been assured of the moral value, he was so convinced of the seductive powers of poetry that he deliberately utilized them to make palatable the forbidding thoughts of his essay On the Nature of Things. The long passage is worth quoting entire because his comparison ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... found refuge in intellectual work. In a letter to his father he urges him to send him the latest magazines and books. June 1, 1868, he writes from Prattville: "I shall go to work on my essays, and on a course of study in German and in the Latin works of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study." In another letter he said: "I have been deeply engaged in working out some metaphysical ideas for some time, — an application which goes on all the time, whether I sit at desk or walk the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... him Cicero and Livy, which latter two I found less arresting; then came Lucretius, and his De Rerum Naturae proved a succulent dish ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... should be sorry to violate any sentiment of [Greek: to semnon] about a man of Macaulay's genius, but what is a decorous term for a description of the doctrine of Lucretius's great poem, thrown in parenthetically, as the 'silliest and meanest system of natural and moral philosophy!' Even disagreeable artifices of composition may be forgiven, when they serve to vivify ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... this was the moment that Noel chose for dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is something about 'previously demented' in some Latin chap—Virgil or Lucretius—that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... has grown and strengthened into an imperious demand of man's intellectual nature. It long ago prompted Caesar to say that he would exchange his victories for a glimpse of the sources of the Nile; it wrought itself into the atomic theories of Lucretius; it impelled Darwin to those daring speculations which of late years have so agitated the public mind. But in no case, while framing theories, does the imagination create its materials. It expands, diminishes, moulds, and refines, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Bletson, hastening to interfere; "no—that is Lucretius, my darling Lucretius. I cannot let you see it; I have ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... The fiction of some beings which are not in nature, (second notions, as the logicians call them) has been founded on the conjunction of two natures, which have a real separate being. So hippocentaurs were imaged, by joining the natures of a man and horse together; as Lucretius tells us, who has used this word of image oftener than any of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... that gentle slumber of which they so pathetically lament the privation. The deteriorationist entered into a profound moral soliloquy, in which he first examined whether a philosopher ought to be in love? Having decided this point affirmatively against Plato and Lucretius, he next examined, whether that passion ought to have the effect of keeping a philosopher awake? Having decided this negatively, he resolved to go to sleep immediately: not being able to accomplish this to his satisfaction, he tossed and tumbled, like Achilles or Orlando, first on one side, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... the very man I want!" and without more ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to students, form a proper prelude to the criticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character found its most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a true Roman, gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, the uncompromising haughtiness, and the large scale of his race. Holding, as it ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... whole spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant—cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct, and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural forces out of cosmic atoms, and into ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... [10] This, Cicero says, was taken as an omen; for it sounded like "Cave ne eas," which must therefore have been pronounced Cau' n' eas. Conversely, in poetry, the vowel v sometimes strengthens into consonant v. Thus in Plautus, Lucretius, and even in Vergil and Statius, this happens in such words as puella, suo, genua, larua, and tenuis. Finally, the fact that both sounds of v are represented by the same character, is evidence that those sounds must have been nearly alike. But ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... the nervous system by such potions frequently proved fatal. Such, according to Eusebius, was the fate of the poet Lucretius, who, having been driven to madness by an amatory potion, and having, during the intervals of his insanity, composed several books, which were afterwards corrected by Cicero, died by his own hand, in the 44th year of his ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... principles as there are species of compound bodies, and that the peculiar form of the primary particles of which any body is composed is the same with the qualities of the compound body itself. This was the celebrated doctrine of Homoeomeria, of which Lucretius furnishes a luminous account in his philosophic poem "De ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Duncan, are compliments of a rare strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been precious indeed. There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the Capitol ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sacred place. Sacred to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There are temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself; to the Lady of the mountain, Pi-hsia-yueen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius—"goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the sky," one inscription calls her—and the kindly mother who gives children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the Great Bear; ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the manifestation of power, from nuere. Varro makes Attius say: "Multis nomen vestrum numenque ciendo." In Lucretius we have mentis numen, and also Numen Augusti. An inscription discovered by Mommsen ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... OVERTHREW THE TARQUINS, taking as his justification the case of Lucretia, though these rulers were even without that hated by all for their tyrannous and violent characteristics. Lucretia was a daughter of Lucretius Spurius, a man that was a member of the senate, and she was wife of the distinguished Tarquinius Collatinus and was renowned, as it chanced, for her beauty and chastity. [Sidenote: FRAG. 10^8] SEXTUS, THE SON OF TARQUIN, SET HIS HEART UPON ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... the discomfiture of Malecasta, with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself more free to introduce what he pleases. Allusions to real ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... of the day to lay great stress upon what they call "imagination" and "invention," the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect; his moral is as pure ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Lentaigne and his uncle reached him, the one high-pitched and firm, the other, as he imagined, apologetic and deprecatory. The sound of them, the words being indistinguishable, was somewhat soothing. Frank felt as the poet Lucretius did when from the security of a sheltered nook on the side of a cliff he watched boats tossing on the sea. The sense of neighbouring strain and struggle added to the completeness of his own repose. A bed of mignonette scented the air agreeably. Some white ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... Gallus mean I Not Sheridan, but friend Delany. Begin, my Muse! First from our bowers We sally forth at different hours; At seven the Dean, in night-gown drest, Goes round the house to wake the rest; At nine, grave Nim and George facetious, Go to the Dean, to read Lucretius;[2] At ten my lady comes and hectors And kisses George, and ends our lectures; And when she has him by the neck fast, Hauls him, and scolds us, down to breakfast. We squander there an hour or more, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... O Poet of the sad belief, and eloquence "like ebony, at once dark and splendid [It was said of Tertullian that 'his style was like ebony, dark and splendid']," how couldst thou, august Lucretius, deem it but sweet to behold from the steep the strife of the great sea, or, safe from the peril, gaze on the wrath of the battle, or, serene in the temples of the wise, look afar on the wanderings of human error? Is it so sweet ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... declare themselves pupils of the Greeks. Lucretius writes only to expound the philosophy of Epicurus; Catullus imitates the poets of Alexander; Vergil, Theocritus and Homer; Horace translates the odes of ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... manuscript of Pliny's Natural History—all palimpsests—were in some French centre in the Middle Ages, as may be seen from the indisputably eighth-century French writing which covers the ancient texts. The student of Latin literature knows that the manuscript tradition of Lucretius, Suetonius, Caesar, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius—to mention only the greatest names—shows that we are indebted primarily to Gallia Christiana for the preservation of ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... by Botticelli is the "Spring," now in the Academy at Florence. The picture has given rise to endless inquiry, and the explanation was made in the artist's day, and is still made, that it was painted to illustrate a certain passage in Lucretius. This innocent little subterfuge of giving a classic turn to things in art and literature has allowed many a man to shield his reputation and gloss his good name. When Art relied upon the protecting wing of the Church, the poet-painters called their risky ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the Roman in second century B.C. in regard to (1) his idea of God, (2) his sense of Duty. No help from Epicurism, which provided no religious sanction for conduct; Lucretius, and Epicurean idea of the Divine. Arrival of Stoicism at Rome; Panaetius and the Scipionic circle. Character of Scipio. The religious side of Stoicism; it teaches a new doctrine of the relation of man ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... refer the matter of rebuilding to general deliberation, and himself spoke largely and earnestly in behalf of his country, as also may others. At last, calling to Lucius Lucretius, whose place it was to speak first, he commanded him to give his sentence, and the rest as they followed, in order. Silence being made, and Lucretius just about to begin, by chance a centurion, passing by outside with his company ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... attacked Darwin's theory of development, and showed its inadequacy, especially in demanding more time than the physicist could grant for the age of the habitable world. Darwin himself confessed that some of his arguments were convincing; and Munro, the scholar, complimented him for his paper on Lucretius and the Atomic Theory.' In 1878 he constructed a phonograph from the newspaper reports of this new invention, and lectured on it at a bazaar in Edinburgh, then employed it to study the nature of vowel and consonantal sounds. An interesting paper on Rhythm in English ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. "The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman, "are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and perhaps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original form of ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... general testimony of mankind, I should to the relations of particular persons who are now living, and whom I cannot distrust in other matters of fact. I might here add, that not only the historians, to whom we may join the poets, but likewise the philosophers of antiquity have favoured this opinion. Lucretius[80] himself, though by the course of his philosophy he was obliged to maintain that the soul did not exist separate from the body, makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men have often appeared after their death. ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... packed with yawns. It is the malediction of mortals to want what they lack until they get it, when they want it no more. Epicurus said that or, if he did not, Lucretius said it for him. 'Surgit amari aliquid.' But here I am running into quotations when the only ones that interest anybody are those in the Street. Conditions here are revolting. Nowhere at any time has there been a metropolis that so stank to heaven. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 35 Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, the father of Lucretia, was made consul as the colleague of Valerius Publicola, in the place of Brutus, who had been slain in battle by Aruns, one of the sons ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... and from this primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilisation, not by external guidance or as a consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long period. [Footnote: Lucretius v. 1448 sqq. (where the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Nominally a series of sermons, they in reality represent, and in the present century form perhaps the only worthy representatives of, that school of philosophic poetry to which, in ancient literature, the work of Lucretius belonged, and of which, in the literature of our own country, the "Seasons" of Thomson, and Akenside's "Pleasures of the Imagination," furnish adequate examples. He would, I suspect, be no discriminating critic ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... be any truly painful fact about the world now tolerably well established by ample experience and ample records, it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly denied to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In general, the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so “God-intoxicated” ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Idyl IV. The sturdy reaper, Milon, as he levels the swathes of corn, derides his languid and love-worn companion, Buttus. The latter defends his gipsy love in verses which have been the keynote of much later poetry, and which echo in the fourth book of Lucretius, and in the Misanthrope of Moliere. Milon replies with the song of Lityerses—a string, apparently, of popular rural couplets, such as Theocritus may have heard chanted ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... thought it his duty to attend exclusively to politics, and that his friends could not venture, except when the Republic was quiet and prosperous, to intrude on him with their philosophical and poetical productions. It is on this account that Lucretius puts up the exquisitely beautiful prayer for peace ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather than with Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to describe his Beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter for the stateliness and largeness of her Person, but as Lucretius says: ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... dentesque fuerunt Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami, Et flamma atque ignes, postquam sunt cognita primum. Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta. Et prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus, etc. Lucretius, v. 1283. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... heartsome, dear and pale — Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artist's way expressed and bodied. Oh, In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha (sweetest masters! Let me lay These arms this once, this humble once, about Your reverend necks — the most containing clasp, For all in all, this world ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... deserts of Time had left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus Lucretius. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Lucretius and Statius, I know not of any Latin poet, ancient or modern, who has equalled Casimir in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification. The Odes of this illustrious Jesuit were translated into English about 150 years ago, by a Thomas Hill, I think, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed. The poet's affection—it is scarcely passion—is there, but in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in his grim Nequicquam! which one of Mr Arnold's own contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity, but still with music and truth in Strangers Yet—here receives ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... this been explained by Lucretius, where he describes a shipwreck; and says, the Spectators receive pleasure from feeling themselves safe on land? and by Akenside, in his beautiful poem on the Pleasures of Imagination, who ascribes it to our finding objects for the due exertion ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an early writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down upon the confused and erratic state of the world moving ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... god, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr. Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Epicureans he had absolutely no sympathy. Up to this time these schools and their teachings were known to the Romans only through the medium of the Greek. The only Latin philosophical literature was Epicurean, and, excepting the poem of Lucretius (De Rerum Natura), scarcely famous as yet, consisted entirely of books rudely written, although ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... items of a unit, but are intimate friends whose lives he must devote himself to preserve, whose lives he must be ready to sacrifice as freely as his own. It is well that we neither know nor decide the issues of life and death. There is, I think, a second meaning in the oft-quoted line of Lucretius, Nec bene promeritis capitur, nec tangitur ira. Our prayers are not attended to perhaps because of their very foolishness. I believe when we congratulate ourselves after a battle that we and ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... good success to carry the war into the country of those who profess that belief, and defend it as the safeguard of society. We need not go through his positions. They are substantially those which are familiar to everybody who has read the Third Book of Lucretius's poem, and remembers those magnificent passages which are not more admirable in their philosophy than they are noble and moving in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... wilderness to return it in thunder. As truly say that storms can exhaust the sky, as that poems can exhaust the blue dome of poesy. We doubt, too, the dictum that the earliest poets are uniformly the best. Who knows not that many prefer Eschylus to Homer; and many, Virgil to Lucretius; and many, Milton to Shakspeare; and that a nation sets Goethe above all men, save Shakspeare; and has not the toast been actually given, "To the two greatest of poets—Shakspeare and Byron?" To settle the endless questions connected with such a topic by any dogmatical assertion of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Rome!" intending by the first either himself or Lucretius. The words of Cicero were the secret honey on which the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year; for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth book of the AEneid, he applies these very words to Ascanius. So long had the accents of Cicero's praise lingered ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... which the Cosmos diverts itself at our expense; and of course the Cosmos may permit itself what it likes, and none of us can complain. But is it possible for one of ourselves, a poor, sick, hustled human being, to take up the jest of the absentee gods of Lucretius, and say to his fellow-men: "Believe me, you would do much better to be quite healthy, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... strong on one point. "Write," they said, very loud and clear, "not what you like, but what editors like." I smiled to myself when I started. I felt that I had stolen a march on my rivals. "All round me," I said to myself, "are young authors bombarding editors with essays on Lucretius, translations of Martial, and disquisitions on Ionic comedy. I know too much for that. I work on a different plan." "Study the papers, and see what they want," said my authorities. I studied the papers. Some wanted one thing, apparently, others another. There was one group of three papers whose needs ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sure—that there was any name given to them behind which there was no angry force to be appeased, no intercessory pity to be won? Were not gems medicinal, though they only pressed the finger? Were not all things charged with occult virtues? Lucretius might be right—he was an ancient, and a great poet; Luigi Pulci, too, who was suspected of not believing anything from the roof upward (dal tetto in su), had very much the air of being right over ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... of the dead lived a faint and joyless existence, and whence they sometimes returned to haunt the living in their dreams, were widely spread through the popular imaginations, and it was as the extinction of all superstitious fears that the school of Lucretius and Pliny welcomed the belief that all things ended with death—'Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.' Nor is it by any means certain that even in the school of Plato the thought of another life had a great and operative influence on minds and characters. Death was chiefly represented as ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... doubt the most valuable result to English poetry of the academic attempts, towards the end of the sixteenth century, to write classical verse in English. It could be pointed out triumphantly that all the splendid poetry of classical antiquity—Homer and Lucretius and Virgil, Sappho and Catullus and Horace and Ovid—had been independent of rime; and whatever might be the disagreement on quantitative feet in English, it was impossible to deny that English could successfully ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... ancient if they be compared with our own age, but modern if we think of the foundations of learning, and these men we consider the most learned. What would Virgil, the chief poet among the Latins, have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus, Lucretius, and Homer, and had not ploughed with their heifer? What, unless again and again he had read somewhat of Parthenius and Pindar, whose eloquence he could by no means imitate? What could Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius, Lactantius, Martianus, and in short ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... feminine scorn no fair Vassar-bred lass at us Shall smile if we own that we cannot read Tacitus. No admirer shall ever now weathe with begonias The bust of Suetonius. And so, if you follow me, We'll have to cut Ptolemy. Besides, it would just be considered facetious To look at Lucretius. And you can Not go in Society if 'you read Lucan, And we cannot have any fun ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... infinity calm and restore the soul. Meditation comes with eventide as naturally as action with the morning; our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew that we are one. In the noblest passage in Latin poetry Lucretius invokes the universal spirit of Nature, and identifies it with the creative force which impels the stars and summons the flowers to strew themselves in the path of the sun. There is nothing so refreshing, so reinvigorating, as fresh contact with the fountain whence ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... powders, while now we have lost that secret. The wrong persons might drink love philtres, as in the case of Tristram and Iseult. Or an unskilled rural practitioner might send out the wrong drug, as in the instance of Lucretius, who went ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... that it had the power of communicating its attractive property to iron, for we read in Plato's "Ion" that a number of iron rings can be supported in a chain by the Heraclean Stone. Lucretius also describes an experiment in which iron filings are made to rise up and "rave" in a brass basin by a magnet held underneath. We are told by other writers that images of the gods and goddesses were suspended in the air by lodestone in the ceilings of the temples of Diana of Ephesus, of Serapis ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... by him, does Shakespeare depart from magic to the detriment of the play? Would it be better, for example, if a love philter was introduced for consistency's sake? (For literary use of the love philter, see Tennyson's 'Lucretius.') Does it reflect against Ferdinand's courage that he was first to quit the ship? Are Miranda's speeches about her grandmother (I, ii, 140) and to Caliban inconsistent with the maidenly innocence ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... smiled and shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names, 'GENTES ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Lentulus Leontini Lepidus, Consul Lepidus, Triumvir Leptis Lesbos Letter-writing Lex de Repetundis Licinian Rogations Licinius Liger Lights Liguria Lilybaeum Lipara Islands Liris, R. Literature Livia Livilla Livius Locri Longinus Luca Lucan Lucania Luceres Luceria Lucilius Lucretia Lucretius Lucullus Lupercalia Luperci ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... want of the want of, puts an end to hospitality and friendship motives for embracing injured by faction helped by religion of country, defined Love, the last legacy of Christ of self, not a fault Loyalty, a means to obtaining good character Lucretius ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... B.C.), whose poem "On the Nature of Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He is chiefly noted for his lyrics. Virgil (70-19 B.C.), in the Aeneid, has produced a genuine Roman epic, although his dependence on Homer ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... even in dying, wholly detach himself from the idea of life; in his ignorance he must needs imagine that there is in him something that survives him, and cannot sufficiently separate or emancipate himself from his remains" —Lucretius, iii. 890.] ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... be the occasion of this heroic reaction of the soul. In the first place, the evil may be felt; but at the same time the sense that, great as it may be in itself, it cannot touch us, may stimulate extraordinarily the consciousness of our own wholeness. This is the sublimity which Lucretius calls "sweet" in the famous lines in which he so justly analyzes it. We are not pleased because another suffers an evil, but because, seeing it is an evil, we see at the same time our own immunity from it. We might soften the picture a little, and perhaps make the principle even clearer ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... little less pleased with Spanish. But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently asserted that he knows much more about them; that he thinks them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of them—through poems, historical romances, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... African theology which interests us. The Supreme Being, in spite of the potency which his supposed place as latest evolved out of the ghost-world should naturally give him, is neglected, either as half forgotten, or for philosophical reasons. For these reasons Epicurus and Lucretius make their gods otiosi, unconcerned, and the Wayao, with their universal collective spirit, are no ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to defend the religion of the state against its enemies, the poets and the philosophers, a poet, also armed with philosophy, was trying to defend the Roman people against its worst enemy, superstition. It may not seem as though Lucretius belonged among the friends of old Roman religion, and as though the De Rerum Natura were exactly a religious poem, and yet his work was in so far helpful to old Roman religion in that it attacked the excesses ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... of Naples constantly increases its list of prohibited books. Among the works now excluded, Humboldt's Cosmos, Shakspeare, Goldsmith, Heeren's Historical Treatises, Ovid, Lucian, Lucretius, Sophocles, Suetonius, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, E. Girardin, G. Sand, Lamartine, Valery's L'Italie, Goethe, Schiller, Thiers, A. Dumas, Moliere, all the German philosophers, and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace, or Anacreon,—where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of Lucretius,—decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for suspected liberal tendencies, but is now restored to favour and placed at the head of the Royal Typography. Signor Andreoni received me with every mark of esteem, and after having shown me some of the finest examples of his work—such as the Pindar, the Lucretius and the Dante—accompanied me to a neighbouring coffee-house, where I was introduced to several lovers of agriculture. Here I learned some particulars of the Duke's attempted reforms. He has undertaken the work of draining the vast marsh of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... huic se praebens: an attempt to translate [Greek: to poioun] and [Greek: to paschon] of the Theaetetus, [Greek: to othen] and [Greek: to dechomenon] of the Timaeus (50 D). Cic. in Tim. has efficere and pati, Lucretius I. 440 facere and fungi. Ea quae: so Gruter, Halm for MSS. eaque. The meaning is this; passive matter when worked upon by an active generative form results in an aliquid, a [Greek: tode ti] as Aristotle calls it. ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... practical men, he was religious, and his gods must go with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... out of the clash of billiard-balls as out of the clash of atoms and electrons. This allusion to billiard-balls recalls to my mind a striking passage from Tyndall's famous Belfast Address which he puts in the mouth of Bishop Butler in his imaginary argument with Lucretius, and which shows how thoroughly Tyndall appreciated the difficulties of his own position in advocating the theory of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... sacred lore, Mosaic dreams in Genesis explore, Doat with Copernicus, or darkling stray With Newton, Ptolemy, or Tycho Brahe! To you I sing not, for I sing of truth, Primeval systems, and creation's youth; Such as of old, with magic wisdom fraught, Inspired LUCRETIUS ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... disbelief of the supernatural prevailed in the Epicurean school. A type of the more earnest spirits of this class is seen at a period a little earlier than the Christian era in Lucretius, living mournfully in the moral desert which his doubts had scorched into barrenness.(127) The world is to him a scene unguided by a Providence: death is uncheered by the hope of a future life. An example ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... and though a proper medium ought to be studied in all productions; yet this medium lies not in a point, but admits of a very considerable latitude." Consider the wide distance, in this respect, between Mr. Pope and Lucretius. These seem to lie in the two greatest extremes of refinement and simplicity which a poet can indulge himself in, without being guilty of any blameable excess. All this interval may be filled with poets, who may differ from each other, but may be equally admirable, each in his peculiar ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... good Latinist who might offer good counsel. But be you very careful that you come not against me. You should not escape, but may burrow underground sooner than that. Your Aristotle should not help you, nor Lucretius, nor Lucan, nor Silius Italicus. Diodorus Siculus hath no maxim that should help you against me; but, like Diodorus the Dialectician, you should die of shame. Seneca shall help you if you but dally with that fool thought ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... Natural History, affirms that death is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman is so insane ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Rome in the late Republic, the Rome of Cicero, was 'enlightened,' as was the Greece of Lucian; that is the educated classes were enlightened. Yet Lucretius, writing only for the educated classes, feels obliged to combat the belief in ghosts and the kind of Calvinism which, but for his poem, we should not know to have been widely prevalent. Lucian, too, mocks frequently at educated belief ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... is this all. For the subject, as unpromising as it seemeth at first view, is no less than that of Lucretius, to free men's minds from the bondage of religion; and this not by little hints and by piecemeal, after the manner of those little atheistical tracts that steal into the world, but in a thorough wholesale manner; by making ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Marcus Valerius Messala, who then commanded the fleet in Sicily; but the fathers denied that a person could be appointed dictator who was not in the Roman territory, and this was limited by Italy. Marcus Lucretius, a plebeian tribune, having taken the sense of the senate upon the question, it was decreed, "that the consul before he quitted the city, should put the question to the people, as to whom they wished to ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... one Easter night, When the gay gods too blest to be polite Gods at their ease, like those of learned Lucretius, Laught, whistled, groaned, uproariously facetious— A well-drest member of the middle gallery, Whose "ears polite" disdained such low canaillerie, Rose in his place—so grand, you'd almost swear Lord Winchelsea himself ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Paradise Lost was the work of a man whose politics were hateful to the ruling powers. But Etherege's She Would If She Could, Wycherley's Country Wife, Dryden's Translations from the Fourth Book of Lucretius, obtained the Imprimatur without difficulty; for Dryden, Etherege and Wycherley were courtiers. From the day on which the emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of our literature began. That purification ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... same origin.[11] But there are other places where its origin is traced with more precision. One of the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" says that he has read, but does not remember where, "that this line was immediately taken from one in the 'Anti-Lucretius' of Cardinal Polignac."[12] Another correspondent shows the intermediate authority.[13] My own notes were originally made without any knowledge of these studies, which, while fixing its literary origin, fail to exhibit the true character ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Lucretius specially recommended the quadrupedal variation of coitus (Bk. iv, 1258), and Ovid describes (end of Bk. iii of the Ars Amatoria) what he regards as agreeable variations, giving the preference, as the easiest and simplest method, to that in which the woman lies half supine on her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... whose bachelor's house was always open to me after noon: Sir Sedley was visible to no one but his valet before that hour. A perfect bachelor's house it was, too, with its windows opening on the Park, and sofas nicked into the windows, on which you might loll at your ease, like the philosopher in Lucretius,— ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the shepherds of Admetus; and Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our history, Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. 'T is the very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts; 't was the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... lead a soft delicate and idle life immersed in sloth and pleasure, escaping like a runaway from the honor of Parnassus, the Lyceum and the Academy, into the lodgings of Epicurus, and should harbor in those lodgings in a quarter where neither Virgil nor Catullus nor Horace nor Lucretius himself had ever stayed.' This excited such indignation in the poet's breast that: 'I said oftentimes with open face and free speech that I would rather be a servant of any prince his enemy than submit to this indignity, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... before the age of thirteen he had mastered the whole of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Thucydides, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Logic, Tacitus, Juvenal, Quinctilian, parts of Ovid, Terence, Nepos, Caesar, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Polybius, and many other authors, besides learning geometry, algebra, and the differential calculus. But that lad was crammed scientifically like a Strasbourg goose; our ordinary modern writers are not walking cyclopaedias, and are rarely prodigious ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the whispers not yet audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established order of things in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... settled all these matters, he nominated Lucretius, the father of Lucretia, as his colleague, and gave up the fasces to him as a mark of respect, because he was the elder man. This custom, that the elder of the two consuls has the fasces carried before him, remains to this day. As Lucretius ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... loathing from the new faith which has conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... there boxes, and a thousand colors of objects; and you will see 'oesypum,' the ointment of the fleece, trickling down and flowing upon her heated bosom. These drugs, Phineus, smell like thy tables; not once alone has sickness been caused by this to my stomach." Lucretius also, in his Fourth Book, l. 1168, speaks of a female who "covers herself with noxious odors, and whom her female attendants fly from to a distance, and chuckle by stealth." See also the Mostellaria of Plautus, Act I., Scene 3, l. 135, where Philematium is introduced ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... (to which from my love of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first decade); all Sallust; a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphoses; some plays of Terence; two or three books of Lucretius; several of the Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on oratory; also his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the historical explanations in Mingault's notes. ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... youthful mind that it is wicked to point at the stars, though why he cannot tell. But the Pitris are not stars only, nor do they content themselves with idly looking down on the affairs of men, after the fashion of the laissez-faire divinities of Lucretius. They are, on the contrary, very busy with the weather; they send rain, thunder, and lightning; and they especially delight in rushing over the housetops in a great gale of wind, led on by their chief, the mysterious ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... of Virgil's Eclogues, Ovid's Elegies, Odes of Horace, London 1864. He translated likewise the Epistle of Phaedra to Hyppolitus, printed in the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, by several hands. He wrote the Prologue to Mrs. Bhon's City Heiress. Prefixed to Creechis Lucretius, there is a copy of verses written by Mr. Otway, in praise of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... distil.—Ver. 500. He alludes to the manner in which frankincense is produced, it exuding from the bark of the tree in drops; this gum, Pliny the Elder and Lucretius call by the name of 'stacta,' or 'stacte.' The ancients flavoured their ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness of form and diction, and actually thought Dryden's fine lines about to-morrow being falser than the former clay equal to any eight lines in Lucretius. But his words truly express the effect of the Prelude on more vulgar minds than his own. George Eliot, on the other hand, who had the inward eye that was not among Macaulay's gifts, found the Prelude full of material for a daily liturgy, and it is easy to imagine how she fondly ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Lucretius cries, 'That life was mine which thou hast here deprived. If in the child the father's image lies, Where shall I live now Lucrece is unlived? Thou wast not to this end from me derived If children pre-decease progenitors, We are their offspring, ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... appetite are perpetually interchangeable; and, therefore, appeareth to be good in itself simply, without fallacy or accident. Neither is that pleasure of small efficacy and contentment to the mind of man, which the poet Lucretius ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... but that I call custom of speech, which is the consent of the learned; as custom of life, which is the consent of the good. Virgil was most loving of antiquity; yet how rarely doth he insert aquai and pictai! Lucretius is scabrous and rough in these; he seeks them: as some do Chaucerisms with us, which were better expunged and banished. Some words are to be culled out for ornament and colour, as we gather flowers to strew houses or make garlands; ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... the classics. In the old solitary years, a long time ago, by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,—in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to Virgil. He is ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed Augustus. It was not Marot who ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... character, alliteration was known to the Latins, especially in early times, and Cicero blames Ennius for writing "O Tite tute, Tati, tibi tanta, tyranne, tulisti.'' Lucretius did not disdain to employ it as an ornament. We read in Shakespeare:— "Full fathom five thy father lies: Of his bones are corals made.'' In Pope:— "Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.', In Gray:— "Weave ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... This assertion is as false as it is foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present popularity: he recited,—and without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and given it to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all the great poets of antiquity, were the delight of their contemporaries.[3] The very existence of a poet, previous to the invention ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... been brought there by our senses, and our intelligence is only the combination of the atoms composing our souls with the atoms that external matter sends, so to speak, into our souls. The doctrines of Democritus will be found again in those of Epicurus and Lucretius. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... quill plucked from a screech-owl were required for the enchantments of Canidia, ossa ab ore rapta jejunae canis, plumanque nocturna strigis. And yet it was just at that period Rome had inherited from Greece the Philosophy of the Epicureans and that of the Sceptics and was maturing the poem of Lucretius Carus! ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... more overwhelming conception of the sum of things. "Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?" is the cry of Hebrew piety as well as of modern science; and the "majestas cognita rerum,"—the recognized majesty of the universe—teaches Lucretius only the indifference of gods and the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... was a votary of Cybele, and a spiritual ancestor of General Booth. The worship of Cybele is well described by Lucretius, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... treasurers. The first were Publius Veturius and Marcus Minucius; and a large sum was collected, for they assessed one hundred and thirty thousand, excusing orphans and widows from the payment. After these dispositions, he admitted Lucretius, the father of Lucretia, as his colleague, and gave him the precedence in the government, by resigning the fasces to him, as due to his years, which privilege of seniority continued to our time. But within a few days Lucretius died, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... system of Epicurus and Lucretius. Without going so far back, there are a thousand others quite as ridiculous, with which it is unnecessary ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom—visions something akin, as I imagine, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton |
